March 11, 2009
-
Art Humor:
Sein Feld
in Translation
(continued from
May 15, 1998)
The New York Times March 10–
”Paris | A Show About Nothing“–
The Times describes one of the empty rooms on exhibit as…
“… Yves Klein’s ‘La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Le Vide‘ (‘The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State Into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, the Void’)”
This is a mistranslation. See “An Aesthetics of Matter” (pdf), by Kiyohiko Kitamura and Tomoyuki Kitamura, pp. 85-101 in International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Volume 6, 2002–
“The exhibition «La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière-première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée», better known as «Le Vide» (The Void) was held at the Gallery Iris Clert in Paris from April 28th till May 5th, 1955.” –p. 94
“… «Sensibility in the state of prime matter»… filled the emptiness.” –p. 95
Kitamura and Kitamura translate matière première correctly as “prime matter” (the prima materia of the scholastic philosophers) rather than “raw material.” (The phrase in French can mean either.)
Related material:
The Diamond Archetype and
The Illuminati Diamond.The link above to
prima materia
is to an 1876 review
by Cardinal Manning of
a work on philosophy
by T. P. Kirkman, whose
“schoolgirls problem” is
closely related to the
finite space of the
diamond theorem.
